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The Effect of Network Width on the Performance of Large-batch Training

3 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

3 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) suffer from communication overheads, attributed to the high frequency of gradient updates inherent in small-batch training. Training with large batches can reduce these overheads; however, large batches can affect the convergence properties and generalization performance of SGD. In this work, we take a first step towards analyzing how the structure (width and depth) of a neural network affects the performance of large-batch training. We present new theoretical results which suggest that--for a fixed number of parameters--wider networks are more amenable to fast large-batch training compared to deeper ones. We provide extensive experiments on residual and fully-connected neural networks which suggest that wider networks can be trained using larger batches without incurring a convergence slow-down, unlike their deeper variants.

fields

cs.CL 2 cs.LG 1

years

2022 1 2021 2

representative citing papers

Scaling Laws for Transfer

cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

citing papers explorer

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

  • Scaling Laws for Transfer cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 136 · internal anchor

    Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

  • Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · none · ref 255

    Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

  • A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment cs.CL · 2021-12-01 · conditional · none · ref 178

    Ranked preference modeling outperforms imitation learning for language model alignment and scales more favorably with model size.